Lightfoot Concert Homey, Folksy

Seeing a Gordon Lightfoot concert at the Bushnell Memorial in 1992 is not all that different than seeing him 20 years ago when he was already established as a troubadour of folk songs.

There are those familiar, sing-along-under-your-breath hits: "Beautiful," "If You Could Read My Mind," "Sundown," "The Wreck of the Edmund Fitzgerald" and "Early Morning Rain" (a hit for Peter, Paul and Mary).

And then there are the album cuts that faithful fans recognize with a bar or two: "Cotton Jenny" (a hit for fellow Canadian Anne Murray), "In My Fashion," "A Lesson In Love" and "Don Quixote."

Saturday night's generous 28-song, two-hour concert was trademark Lightfoot. What you hear on the album is almost what you hear on the stage: everything in perfect acoustical balance, every guitar solo crisply played, every instrument -- three guitars, one keyboard and drums -- blending behind the unmistakable Lightfoot vocal timbre.

It's an odd voice -- somewhat nasal, with a clenched-jaw delivery that clips the words. Yet it's so familiar that its oddly comforting. Lightfoot, 53, has lost the top notes and doesn't even attempt them anymore. All has been transposed down. Yet his baritone has held up nicely, even sounding rich in the lower tones.

He's been working with sidemen Rick Haynes on bass and Terry Clements on lead guitar for more than 20 years, and the experience shows. Lightfoot was in a particularly expansive mood -- well, expansive for a performer who rarely says more than five words between songs -- and tailored the second half of his show to requests. He introduced five songs from his coming album "Waiting for You" (written for his wife, Elizabeth) to start off the second set and then crammed in as many oldies as he could, even reading dedications to the crowd from written requests.

"You're a great audience," he offered late in the evening. "This is to Margie from Rick," he said as he sang "Winter's Night" with the sentiment "I would be happy just to hold the hand I love on this winter's night with you."

Lightfoot is a pretty fair poet, and when the melody matches

the power of his words he creates a pop standard. "Canadian Railroad Trilogy," which ended the regular performance, is about as good a history tale as the more popular "Wreck of the Edmund Fitzgerald."

For a guy who has been on the road for 30 years, Lightfoot still has the chops to hold a crowd for more than two hours and still have them yelling requests. It's not a bad legacy for a Canadian troubadour